


heyheyheyyy I'm a little birthday boyy

by rickyisms



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, platonic intimacy kind of, poor gambling, tony is dumb but also smrt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:16:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23534437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rickyisms/pseuds/rickyisms
Summary: " for a prompt, could you do WTF hanging out in Vegas, maybe?"_____It's Tango's twenty-first, Ford plans a vacation, Whiskey reluctantly has fun
Relationships: Denice "Foxtrot" Ford & Tony "Tango" Tangredi & Connor "Whiskey" Whisk
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	heyheyheyyy I'm a little birthday boyy

**Author's Note:**

> this is a prompt that I posted on my tumblr, i think it's cute

“Whiskey, just because you spent your twenty-first birthday doing dryland training in the gym, doesn’t mean Tango wants to do the same,” Ford says. It’s the third time today she’s brought it up. 

“Denice,” he says warning. 

They’re in the library, he glares over the top of his textbook. 

“Whiskey come on, he only gets one twenty first birthday.”

It’s near the beginning of sophomore year, Whiskey’s been legal since summer and Tango’s been itching to be able to stop using a fake. 

“Ford, why are you so stuck on this?” Whiskey hisses. 

“Why are you so against it?” Ford whispers back. 

“Because Vegas is stupid, literally nothing should be able to exist in the middle of the desert and some assholes decided to build a city.”

“Did I stumble upon some Nevada/Arizona beef I wasn’t aware of.”

“Oh my god,” Whiskey groans. 

“I have a fake, we can do all the dumb stuff you’re supposed to do in Vegas, it’s an American tradition,” she says. 

“So is cockfighting.”

Whiskey, for all his emotional faults, really does care about his friends. So he relents, eventually. He chips in for Tango’s plane ticket and they surprise him on his birthday, three days before the fall break. Ford gives him a cupcake with a sparkler stuck in it the day of his birthday and that’s how they tell him about their plans. The tickets are for their fall reading week. Tango throws his arms around both of them and squeezes them so hard that Ford’s pretty sure she hears Whiskey’s shoulder pop. 

There’s nothing glamorous about Las Vegas on a Monday afternoon in October. Ford insisted that Tango wear one of those little blue buttons that says, “birthday boy” on it. Tango obliges after one question. 

“Are you sure it’s not birthday blasphemy because it’s not still my actual birthday?” 

Ford reaches up to pat his shoulder, “It’s your birthday trip, it counts.”

“Whiskey, will you take my picture with the sign?” Tango asks. 

They’re standing in front of that Vegas sign with the light bulbs and the words _welcome to Las Vegas_ written on it. 

“Tanger, there are like 80 other people here.”

“But it’s my birthday, Tango fake pouts, “I want the dumb tourist picture.”

“Ugh,” Whiskey relents. 

It’s hotter than he thought it would be but he refuses to complain because then Ford will tell him it was a dumb idea to wear jeans and he’ll have to prove his Arizonan origins by boiling himself alive without flinching, the same way Ransom proved he was from Ontario by taking exclusively cold showers for a month last year. 

He pulls out his own phone, Tango throws him his, Whiskey snaps a handful of pictures before Ford jumps in, she kicks her leg out in front of her, both of them are grinning and they pull Whiskey towards them. He cracks a smile as he takes a selfie with them. 

“Connor Whisk, is that a smile?” Ford ribs him. 

“I’m not incapable of having fun.”

“No, just morally opposed,” Ford says. 

“Oh my god is that guy floating!” Tango says, walking up the strip. He’s staring across the street at one of the buskers. 

“Tang the guy has a pole in his…” Ford starts. 

Whiskey puts his hand on her shoulder, “Let him have this.”

Ford has their two day trip planned to a T. In the afternoon, they’ll be going a magic show (Tango’s into it), then they’ll find somewhere cheap to eat dinner. 

“We can spend an hour and a hundred bucks each at the casinos that way we don’t end up blowing our tuition money by gambling,” she says. 

Tango emerges from the magic show convinced that Harry Potter was non-fiction. Ford begs Whiskey to let her explain the concept of sleight of hand but Whiskey shakes his head. 

“Honestly, fuck magicians,” Whiskey says.

“That shit was delightful, Connor, what could you have against the magical art of illusion?” Tango demands. 

“I don’t like to be tricked,” Whiskey says. He pulls his sunglasses back over his eyes, the sun setting over the desert is already blinding him. 

Whiskey joins in when they laugh at him because he knows it’s an inherently dumb thing to say and he can laugh at himself when it’s among friends. 

Everything in Vegas gets bright at night, Whiskey spends most of dinner reminding them that it’s probably not too late to get tickets to the Aces game. 

“If I wanted to watch rats play, I’d go to the pet store,” Tango says. Decent chirp, even Whiskey will admit. 

He can see the neon, even inside of the shitty little McDonalds they’ve found to eat dinner. Whiskey wonders how anyone sleeps in the city that always seems to be brighter than anything Whiskey’s ever seen. It’s not in the diet plan Whiskey drew up for himself at the beginning of the year, but he eats his chicken nuggets because it’s easier than taking the chirps from his friends. 

Everyone seems to be doing something, like every person in the McDonalds has a story, there’s a group of girls in glitter mascara, already drunk at 6pm. A family of tourists, a lost looking businessman. Whiskey almost wants to ask the teenager working behind the counter about the kind of stuff she sees every day. 

“Okay, but like, what if one of us wins a jackpot?” Tango says. 

“I mean statistically-” Whiskey starts. 

Ford punches him, “Okay but like, don’t be such a downer. Can’t we imagine.”

“Obviously if one of us wins we’d split it,” Tango says. 

The other two nod in agreement. 

“I think I’d want to blow it all here,” Tango muses, “Like it feels like a once in a lifetime kind of thing.”

“I’d probably pay my credit card bill,” Whiskey shrugs. 

Ford thinks for a minute before Tango and Whiskey say in unison. 

“Broadway tickets.”

Ford shakes her head, annoyed that they’re right. 

“It’s rigged anyway, so don’t make too many plans.”

“Okay but if we win we’re taking one of those fancy ubers back to the hotel.”

The hotel in question is a courtyard Marriott that Ford got the best price for. 

“Okay but if we win big we’ll get a better hotel so that one of us doesn’t have to sleep on the floor,” Ford adds. 

Whiskey humours them with a nod. 

“Whoever loses the most money has to sleep on the floor,” Whiskey says a few minutes later when they’re throwing out their garbage. 

“Oh you’ve got a deal,” Tango shakes his hand, they both turn, Whiskey shakes Ford’s left and Tango shakes her right. 

Whiskey pushes his sunglasses up onto his head as they walk up the strip and into the casino that Ford probably researched for hours on the plane. Everything’s gold plated and the sounds of slot machines fill the room. There’s a high rollers table in the back that Whiskey makes Tango promise not to touch. Whiskey makes himself comfortable at the slot machines, he never really learned how to play card games and he doesn’t think now is the time to learn. He can pull a lever though. In the end, he loses money and decides to cut his losses, pocketing the twenty bucks he has left. He holes up by the bar for the rest of the night. He has a headache, from the lights and the music and the relentless beeps and chirps of slot machines. And the chatter of people. 

He tries to remember which beers are classy and finally just orders a rum and coke. 

Foxtrot finds herself sitting next to him with a cocktail in hand, the intimidation tactics that work on jocks, it turns out, do not work on blackjack dealers. She shakes her head, mumbling to herself as she knocks back her drink. 

“Fuck casinos,” she says.

And when Tango finally shows up at the bar, he’s flushed in the cheeks from drinking too much. 

“So how’d it go?” Ford asks, bitter, probably hoping for bad news, just so the three of them can be on the same page.

“Really good, I won a hundred bucks,” he says. 

“‘Swawesome,” Ford says, she’s stifling a yawn. 

Whiskey hates the concept Las Vegas for many reasons, one is that there are no clocks in the casinos. It could be 2am and they wouldn’t know. 

“Where’d you win it.”

“Card game!” Tango says. 

“We were at the blackjack table together,” Ford says, “He kept kicking the dealer’s ass.”

“I dunno, it was just kind of math,” he shrugs. 

Ford’s eyes go wide, she whispers,”Tango, were you counting cards?”

Tango shrugs, “Kind of maybe, I guess,” he says. 

“Isn’t that supposed to be really hard?” Whiskey asks. 

Ford just nods, jaw agape, “and super not allowed in casinos.”

“I don’t think anyone noticed,” he shrugs. 

“You’re an enigma, Tony Tangredi,” Ford says. 

“Like a mystery?” Tango asks. 

“Holy fuck,” Whiskey says. 

It’s not the jackpot that they’d imagined, it isn’t enough for a fancy uber, in fact, they elect to just walk to the hotel. They take pictures in the vegas lights as they go. Even Whiskey has to admit that they turn out pretty cool. When they get back to the hotel, Tango pulls out the room service menu. 

“I said I wanted to blow a jackpot while we were here,” he grins, “Also,” he adds, “I won money, Foxy broke even, so looks like Whiskey’s on the floor.”

Whiskey groans, “Fine, but I’m stealing a pillow from each of you.”

They pile all of the pillows on the floor, tear the blankets off the bed and make what can only be described as a mess that they sit on top of. Whiskey begs them to turn on the Aces game and they relent when the only other thing they can find on the hotel TV is a re-run of Home Improvement with Tim Allen from the nineties. 

Tango jumps up to get the room service, a devious grin on his face. 

Vegas is dumb, and Whiskey still hates it as a concept, but he can appreciate it as an excuse to run somewhere with his friends. No one’s chasing him down for assignments in Nevada. There’s no Bitty, no professors, no lax bros, no tension. Just a hockey game on TV and a flashing neon sign out the window. The blankets are soft and Ford throws french fries at him when he calls the Golden State Warriors overrated and stacked. The milkshake Tango orders is birthday cake flavoured and he spends a solid ten minutes trying to convince Ford that it’s not a food crime to dip french fries in ice cream. 

“I’d start cheering for the Aces before I dipped a potato in ice cream.”

They start getting tired a few hours after the Aces game is over, there’s an Avalanche game on after. When Whiskey closes his eyes he hears the sound of skates, and Tango’s soft breathing and Ford’s occasional shifting in the blanket nest. 

As it turns out, it doesn’t matter that Whiskey lost more money than his friends because they all pass out on the floor. Ford’s absentmindedly runs her fingers through Whiskey’s hair after she tries and fails to braid it. 

“Gotta grow out the flow,” Tango mumbles, half asleep. His head is resting on Whiskey’s thigh and Whiskey lets him stay there, curled in on himself, eyes fluttering closed. 

“I love you guys,” Tango mutters and Whiskey’s honestly not sure if he’s talking in his sleep or just getting mushy before he goes to sleep. 

Whiskey throws himself at Tango, envelopes him in a hug, Ford throws herself on top of them. 

“Happy birthday, bud,” Whiskey says. 

“We should come back in the summer for Foxy’s birthday,” Tango says. 

“NO!” Ford shouts at the same time as Whiskey says, “Absolutely not,” 

Tango snorts, “I think I’m banned for counting cards anyway.”

Whiskey laughs, Ford laughs. 

“I’m still not entirely sure what that means.”

And they laugh the kind of laughter that only comes when you’re with your best friends, full of junk, sobering up, sitting on the floor. 


End file.
